Historical Erasure: Far From New!

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Earlier this week I shared some resources for parts of New England history that are often buried in the rush to "explain" who we are and what has happened. In this season of thinking about the early battles of the American Revolution, 250 years ago, I've been mulling over that sharply uncomfortable phrase, "History is written by the victors."

According to Slate.com, although the line is often attributed to Winston Churchill, it has earlier and maybe more authentic roots. Remember my mention of the Battle of Culloden in Scotland, with a survivor who came to my part of Vermont and has an extensive tribute on his burial stone? Check this out: 

"One biographer’s description of the 1746 Battle of Culloden in Scotland laments that we will never know how many members of his subject’s clan died on the battlefield, because 'it is the victor who writes the history and counts the dead.'"

That's what Matthew Phelan wrote at slate.com (https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html).

As we work hard to sort out the most credible parts of each day's global news now, this second example from Phelan may be equally important: 

"Two years later, the saying was in use in United States. In 1891, Missouri Sen. George Graham Vest, a former congressman for the Confederacy who was still at that late date an advocate for the rights of states to secede, used the phrase in a speech, reprinted by the Kansas City Gazette and other papers on the next day, Aug. 21, 1891. 'In all revolutions the vanquished are the ones who are guilty of treason, even by the historians,' Vest said, 'for history is written by the victors and framed according to the prejudices and bias existing on their side.'"  (https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html)

The next post here will be, accordingly, an invitation into a newly published novel of the American Revolution, by Vermont's own Jesse Haas and set in Westminster, Vermont. 

Preserving and Reconnecting With Our History

Time chugs along -- I will soon mark 50 years of living in my adopted state among the Green Mountains and the many rivers. When I first arrived here, people still liked to say Vermont had more cows than people. It probably wasn't quite true then, and it's definitely not so today. But still, with about six hundred thousand people making up the entire state, there's an illusion that a person can learn and catch up with the intimate details of its history.

That's sort a a fun-house mirror effect, maybe because we don't see many people around us (not counting life in Burlington, our big city). If you know the name of each person you talk with in the grocery store, and standing in line to check out refreshes your memory of recent losses among them, well, it's easy to think you can know most of what there is to know about Vermont.

Nope.

The town where I first began delving into Vermont's history, Barnet, is a dozen miles from where I now live. I left Barnet in 2002, but I'm still learning from my explorations there. The church, the beach, the back roads I walked as I adjusted to single parenting, the school where my sons developed their determination and their desire to mingle with other cultures and travel far and wide -- all those are "mine" even though I don't live there any longer. 

But it was the cemeteries that adjusted my sense of America, and of time, of history. On the hillside halfway between the church and the dairy barn where I shoveled sawdust every Sunday for more than a year, my favorite of the town's handful of burying grounds shelters the stone markers of many a Scottish settler who farmed here in the 1800s and even earlier. Although many people call it "the West Barnet cemetery," its other name is the Stuart Cemetery. Among the Scottish immigrants buried in it, there lies Claudius "Cloud" Stuart, also spelled Stewart. I am still amazed to find that Claud Stuart fought in Scotland's Battle of Culloden in 1746 with the supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Alas, not all of Vermont's history has been so proudly or clearly preserved. Its vanishing is called "historical erasure" -- and today a number of organizations and individuals work to undue that erasing. One I appreciate is called Atlantic Black Box, and features the work of both professional historians and grass-roots sorts. It asks: "Why have we been telling certain stories about New England and not others? How did we come to unknow the region’s deep complicity in the institution of slavery and systems of oppression?" 

I connect with those questions because I've found details of both enslavers and enslaved in the Northeast Kingdom, yet we "don't talk about that" very much ... maybe because it embarrasses us?  But Atlantic Black Box is geared mostly to the New England coast,

 To counter historical erasure in our area, grass-roots historians work with the actual Census pages of the 1800s, to see who lived where and did what. My historical fiction is crammed with details gained in this way. Another resource is the Northeast Slavery Records Index (NESRI), which has a searchable database that includes Vermont. Nola Forbes, a retired teacher and ardent historian in our area, also recommends these: DAR has this database Patriots of Color, and this a research guide for Forgotten Patriots (Black Americans & American Indians).

 Try one out. See who you find. Share your discoveries, if you like.

It takes all of us to preserve our history, and to make sure we know what is "real."